The Recommended Reading List

Norman Spinrad tells the story himself, secondhand, through James Sallis's afterword tucked into the book's own back matter: the American Nazi Party put *The Iron Dream* on its recommended reading list. "They really liked the upbeat ending," Spinrad remarks, watching his ur-Nazis spread out to conquer the universe. This is not an ironic footnote discovered decades later by a critic hunting for one. It is printed inside the book, as if Spinrad knew before anyone that his satire would be read straight by exactly the readers it was built to indict — and decided the honest thing to do was confess it rather than pretend the joke had landed cleanly.

The apparatus is the whole argument.